Sometimes you just have to break your own rules when it comes to finding true love. When actor Christopher Sieber joined the cast of Beauty and the Beast on Broadway as Gaston back in 2000, he never would have thought he would start dating one of the forks—let alone marrying him in a small, private Thanksgiving wedding in the living room of their Upper West Side apartment. “Rule number one [was] you don’t date people you work with,” says actor-turned-chef Kevin Burrows, the fork in question.

But that’s exactly what happened last November, when the 43-year-old couple, decided, in light of their new legal right to do so, to exchange vows in front of three friends and their African Grey parrot Khoi Khoi just before sitting down to their Thanksgiving meal. “We always have friends over [for Thanksgiving] and Kevin makes this amazing meal,” says Sieber, the Tony-nominated actor of Spamalot who is currently on tour with La Cage Aux Folles, of their favorite holiday. “It was great timing because I had time off from the tour but also we knew our friends would be around and be able to see it. And we didn’t want to make a big deal out about it because we knew we were going to be together anyway.”

To appease friends and relatives, the couple will celebrate the union with almost 200 guests at a yacht-clubbed themed party near their second home on Lake Tamarack in New Jersey this coming June. And the pair just spent twelve days on their Caribbean honeymoon with Celebrity Cruises, sailing from Florida to Colombia and back without wearing the same outfit twice. (“We have seven suitcases,” Sieber boasts.)

When we sat down with the couple in the very same room they exchanged their vows in, their love is giddily obvious. They constantly make each other laugh. They finish each other sentences. They gossip about buying each other the same Christmas gifts and whether their Midwestern mothers will get along at their June party. When they sit together on the couch and talk about their love, they are sure to maintain several forms of contact. “We never needed a ceremony but we really wanted the actual law behind it. We would have been married years and years ago if we’d been given the rights to do it,” explains Burrows, who left the stage to persue his passion for cooking and now works as a teacher for the cooking school My Cooking Party. Says close friend Frank Conway: “I’ve been friends with both of them for so long that I see that when one of them is on the road for work how much they miss being together. They make it work no matter where they are in the world.”

But none of this would have happened if fate hadn’t dressed the pair up as Disney characters and thrust them on stage. In fact, the couple was shy to the idea of dating at first and instead tried to be friends. “I had known him because I always saw him at the gym and thought, ‘He’s gorgeous but look at that attitude!’” Sieber jokingly reflects. “Little did I know that he was absolutely charming and lovely and gorgeous. Before you knew it we became really good friends and all the filthy secrets that people don’t normally find out until after they’ve been dating we had heard from eachother because we didn’t know we were going to end up together [at the time].”

Just like in a Disney movie, friends became something more after one fateful kiss. “It was my birthday and he came to my dressing room and gave me this kiss,” recalls Sieber. “Now friends kiss and that’s fine but this peck went like .001th of a second longer than a peck should go, and it was electric and I could tell you I have never had a kiss like that before and it changed my life. I was like ‘I don’t know what to do now because he’s put a spell on me and I must be with him.’”

A little push from friends and an unfortunate round of surgery for Sieber and the pair suddenly found themselves living together after only eight weeks. “We went from kind of dating to living together and it could not have been more effortless,” explains Burrows. “I had never lived with someone before and it was as easy as can be.”

Easy is one thing the couple says their relationship has always been. Despite a touring schedule that often keeps them long distances apart, the two say their relationship has always been natural. “Everyone should have their arguments and everyone should have their little things that drive you crazy but those are the things you love in the long run,” shares Sieber, later adding: “But thank goodness there is Skype and iChat.”

It really has been a fairytale-come-true for Burrows and Sieber and they are as conscious of it as anyone. It’s one of the reasons they are so aware of the important responsibility that comes with being one of the early couples to marry under New York’s still-fresh marriage equality law, especially as a couple a little more in the limelight. “[Marriage] is odd and new,” he admits. “It was ‘This is my partner Kevin, and this is my partner Christopher.’ Now its, ‘This is my husband Kevin, this is my husband Christopher.’ That’s new to come out of my mouth. It’s not a bad thing but its just I have to use this thing now because it’s true. It’s our job now to put that out there.”